Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts and part of the Boston metropolitan area. Cambridge was founded as Newtowne in 1631, and it was safely upriver from Boston Harbor. In 1638, it renamed in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge grew as an agricultural village eight miles by road from Boston, and, by the American Revolutionary War, most of the town consisted of farms and estates. On 3 July 1775, George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army in the aftermath of the Battle of Bunker Hill and his appointment as commander-in-chief by the Continental Congress. Between 1790 and 1840, Cambridge grew rapidly, with the construction of the West Boston Bridge in 1792 connecting Cambridge directly to Boston. New bridges and roads turned estates and marshland into prime industrial and residential districts, and Cambridge was incorporated as a city in 1846. Between 1850 and 1900, Cambridge saw streetcar suburban development along the turnpikes, and the glass industry was the city's largest employer for several decades. By 1920, Cambridge was one of New England's main industrial cities, but industry declined during the Great Depression and after World War II. It became more of an intellectual than industrial center, with MIT moving to Cambridge in 1916. After the 1950s, families began to be replaced by single and young people, and the 1980s brought a wave of high-tech startups. In 2016, Cambridge had a populatino of 110,651 people.